Tropico 3 Walkthrough & Strategy Guide

The majority of your citizens will be affiliated to one or more of the different island factions and will be affected by that faction's overall respect towards you. Each faction will have its own demands and will comprise of a different part of your population. The Communists and Religious factions for example will usually have more supporters than the Environmentalists and Intellectuals faction. This proportion is not static and can be changed during the course of the game by setting specific work modes on buildings such as the High School and the Newspaper.

Each faction has a leader whose opinion of your regime has a strong effect on that faction's overall respect. You can issue personal actions from the citizen's info-panel in order to gain an unhappy leader's favor or take more drastic measures and remove the problem altogether.

Elections

Any good dictator knows that elections are a necessary evil. Refusing an election will drastically drop your citizens respect and may even trigger an uprising. You can issue the "Early Elections" edict in order to hold an election anytime you like, but be mindful that this will increase your citizens' democracy expectations and they will demand elections more often in the future.

If you find yourself behind in the polls do not despair - there are still measures you can take to turn the situation around. You can issue various edicts such as "Food for the People" and "Mardi Gras" in order to gain an immediate boost to your citizens' respect. If all else fails you can always make a "slight adjustment" to the ballots on the day of the election. Be careful though, as cheating will lower the respect of your citizens.

Foreign relations

As they say "no man is an island". Just the same an island cannot remain isolated from the rest of the world for long. Balancing your foreign relations between the US and the USSR can be hard but if you manage to get on their good side, you can receive a substantial amount of money in the form of foreign aid. Building a Diplomatic Ministry will help you to improve your foreign relations and will grant you access to new edicts.

When your island enters debt, your relations with the foreign superpowers will begin to worsen rapidly. Be mindful of this, as maintaining bad relations with one superpower for too long will provoke them to invade your island, which will put an untimely end to your regime.

Often the foreign relations with one superpower can take turn for the worse even when you have no debt. Building a military base owned by the other superpowers will prevent the invasion.